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Updated: June 1, 2025


A thick mist came on, and we very nearly lost our way; I was with my party just behind Dickinson's party. We managed to find our way in time. To bed, 3 a.m." "July 12th. "One shell during the morning so shook the place that my head bumped up and down on my pillow. Brigade are very pleased with our work, especially as the left their work unfinished, owing to wind up about trench-mortars!

Then waves of poison-gas. Then trench-mortars and bombs. "It seemed like years!" said one of the Irish crowd. "None of us expected to come out alive." Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black coffee.

Eventually the trench-mortaring got so severe, that the V Corps had a 12-inch howitzer brought up on the railway, and several of these huge shells were fired into Petit Bois when the German trench-mortars started. Another feature to be reckoned with was the approach of the enemy towards K.1 and J.3 by means of a series of fortified mine craters.

Our line here makes a sharp bend round the corner of an orchard, and for security's sake a second trench has been cut behind, making, as it were, the cross-bar of a capital A. The apex of the A is no health resort. Brother Bosche, as already explained, is only fifty yards away, and his trench-mortars make excellent practice with the parapet.

It was no good some of those old gentlemen saying, "We've got 'em beat!" when from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks, without much plan or purpose, was only "asking for trouble" from German counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas, flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling up the lists of death.

The Colonel was most enormously relieved by these arrivals, but his high hopes were a good deal dashed by the artilleryman. That youth explained that he was in effect totally ignorant of trench-mortars and their ways, that he had been shown the thing a week ago, had it explained to him so far as such a rotten toy could be explained and had fired two shots from it.

There were men carefully attending to trench-mortars, others polishing their rifles, and yet others again who had crept by deep tunnels to the cunning positions in front and were busily attending their machine-guns; and behind, along the communication-trenches, in the support and reserve trenches, in a hundred and more dug-outs, there were more poilus with officers amongst them, hearty, confident individuals, living a curious existence, which had now lasted so many months that it seemed to have been their life from the very commencement.

By the same methods I located nine of these German trench-mortars on that front. Later on we captured one of them and I was surprised to see what a primitive affair it was. It consisted of a huge pipe made of wooden staves bound round and round with wire. The charge is in a can like an oil-drum and dropped in the pipe, and then the shell dropped in on top of it.

Preliminary bombardment that's the chorus getting to work! Minor characters the trench-mortars spread the glad news! Band and chorus that's the grand attack working up to boiling-point! Finally, preceded by clouds of gas, the Arch-Comedian in person, supported by spectacled coryphées in brass hats! How's that for a Christmas pantomime?"

While I am talking of trench-mortars, I must tell you about the "blind pig." This was a huge shell with which we frequently got on Fritz's nerves. When it was first used there was some doubt about its accuracy and the infantry were cleared out of the trenches in its immediate front before it was fired.

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